COM shim wizard for Visual Studio 2005

Finally! It took an eternity to get this thing published, but now you can go to MSDN and download COM shim wizard that work with Visual Studio 2005. Original COM shim wizard only worked with Visual Studio 2003 and so many people have requested an upgrade.

For those unfamiliar with the shims here is a short summary: if you are a C# or VB.NET developer writing a COM AddIn for Word, Excel, PowerPoint you want to isolate your AddIn from other managed components that are executing in the process. Here are some of the reasons for doing that. In other words you want to have your AddIn to run in the comfort of its own AppDomain. In the absence of proper VSTO support in this area, you would need to write your own unmanaged loader - yes, this is C++! The wizard can help you out here. After download and installing the COM shim wizard you will be able to create your own native loader in under 2 minutes. The best part - knowledge of C++ is optional.

Go to the background article or skip directly to the download.

Update Dec. 07 2007 : The very last and the best version of the com shim wizard is published here . It has a very nice advantage over previous versions because it uses COM aggregation technique (as opposed to COM containment) to execute the calls. This makes it completely unnecessary to duplicate interfaces on the native proxy class when you add those to the managed class. It also solves the ribbon callbacks issue (see Dmitrii's comments to the post).